Workshops of empire
Subtitle: Stegner, Engle, and American creative writing during the Cold War
By: Eric Bennett
Series: The new American canon : the Iowa series in contemporary literature and culture; New American canon
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 232
ISBN-13: 9781609383718
Subjects: Cold War in literature; Criticism and interpretation; History and criticism; American literature; Creative writing
Description: During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War began, high-minded and well-intentioned scholars, critics, and writers from across the political spectrum argued that human values remained crucial to civilization and that such values stood in dire need of formulation and affirmation. Creative writing emerged as a graduate discipline in the United States amid this astonishing swirl of grand conceptions. Workshops of Empire explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university Book jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-222) and index.
Table of contents: title: The new humanism; title: Liberalism and literature after the war; title: The Rockefeller foundation and postwar internationalism; title: Paul Engle: the creative writing cold warrior; title: Wallace Stegner: the tragic centrist; title: Canonical bedfellows: Ernest Hemingway and Henry James.